David Jones, artist and poet (1895-1974) begins his PREFACE TO THE ANATHEMATA :

'I have made a heap of all that I could find.' (1) So wrote Nennius, or whoever composed the introductory matter to Historia Brittonum. He speaks of an 'inward wound' which was caused by the fear that certain things dear to him 'should be like smoke dissipated'. Further, he says, 'not trusting my own learning, which is none at all, but partly from writings and monuments of the ancient inhabitants of Britain, partly from the annals of the Romans and the chronicles of the sacred fathers, Isidore, Hieronymous, Prosper, Eusebius and from the histories of the Scots and Saxons although our enemies . . . I have lispingly put together this . . . about past transactions, that [this material] might not be trodden under foot'. (2)

(1) The actual words are coacervavi omne quod inveni, and occur in Prologue 2 to the Historia.(2) Quoted from the translation of Prologue 1. See The Works of Gildas and Nennius, J.A.Giles, London 1841.

26 April 2013

To tomorrow's all-in drawing event by the artist collective DAMP and the public.Untitled Pencil will be part of Direct Democracy curated by Geraldine Barlow,at Monash University Museum of Art until 6 June.

24 April 2013

First, two announcements from the CCP about their current season of Robert Rooney artwork.

. . . .

Robert Rooney: A Night of TalksTODAY! Wednesday 24 April 6—8pm CCP : Centre for Contemporary Photography

Artist Philip Brophy, writer and curator David Homewood and Martyn Jolly, Head of Photography and Media Arts, ANU School of Art, speak on and around the work of Robert Rooney.

Children and adolescents are often seen as ragged kid-flaneurs, re-mapping familiar urban or suburban spaces. Using a diverse range of historical Australian sources, Martin Jolly will explore these secret, under the adult radar, territories and trajectories.

Martyn Jolly is Head of Photography and Media Arts at the ANU School of Art. He is an artist and writer. His book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography came out in 2006.

David Homewood's talk will discuss the negation of artistic intention in Rooney's work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. It will focus in particular on the serialised depiction of the commonplace in several of his photographic works.

David Homewood is a writer and curator who lives in Melbourne.

Philip Brophy will discuss how Robert Rooney's painting draws upon a conceptual understanding of the figurative and iconic, and how that legacy relates tocurrent modalities of painting-as-thinking-about-painting.

Philip Brophy writes on painting among other things.

philipbrophy.com

A discussion will follow, lead by the exhibition curators, Maggie Finch and Patrick Pound.

. . . .

THE BOX BROWNIE YEARS 1956-58CURATED BY MAGGIE FINCH AND PATRICK POUND WITH ROBERT ROONEY

An
exhibition of never-before exhibited black-and-white photographs taken
by Robert Rooney with his Box Brownie camera between 1956-58. Created
when Rooney was a student at Swinburne Technical College and influenced
by Charles Blackman and Ben Shahn, among others, they demonstrate an
early fascination with childhood, repetition and seriality—themes that
have persisted throughout his long career.

A sense
of freedom in the action of the children—playing on suburban streets, in
schoolyards and at a suburban quarry and tip—is evident. The youths
also play to the camera. There is a sense of complicity, awareness
without self­consciousness. The apparent innocence of the now nostalgic
scenes, however, is undercut by a melancholy note: this state is
transitional. There is also the potential for danger.

These
marvellous early photographs will be shown alongside three key paintings
from that time, and a recent film The Quadrangle 1956 (2009) made with
these early images.

. . . .bLOGOS/HA HA enjoys and appreciates the art of Robert Rooney. As we do that of John Brack.

Brack (who died in 1999) and Rooney are two distinctively Melbourne artists with much in common. Both rooted in their plot of Melbourne, both working at home and rarely traveling outside their routine. (Of the same generation, Gerald Murnane similarly comes to mind.) Both, through their reading and other communications, very knowledgeable about the larger world of art and ideas. Both of a mind mostly satisfied to find their reference material immediately about them. In the objects and routines of their own homes, streets and suburbs, and in the daily street theatre of stage set Melbourne. Both cool and formal in their productions. Free within their chosen genre limits.

Robert Rooney's art has previously been linked in kind to that of Howard Arkley and Ed Ruscha. (Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley at the Museum of Modern Art Heide, 1995) In this CCP season, mention is made of the influences of Charles Blackman and Ben Shahn. In the advertisements for his 1983 NGA exhibition Melbourne Cool, Daniel Thomas specifically linked Brack and Rooney. (Read hereMemory Holloway's THE AGE review The School of Cool.)

On first seeingthe 1956 Rooney image The Quadrangle, part of the promotion for this CCP exhibition, we were immediately struck by the similarity to John Brack's The Playground of 1959. And in that, from that, a greater commonality than previously appreciated. With a view from time further passed, certain things now appear closer together. Time and place, the personal and the social.
Robert Rooney The Quadrangle 1956detail of The Playground, John Brack, 1959

18 April 2013

This question arises through observation and discussion about Peter Garrett, former singer for Midnight Oilturned Parliamentary functionary.

How can we dance when our earth is turning How do we sleep while our beds are burning- as sung by Peter Garrett, Midnight Oil

Whether 'tis Better to be In

And, being thus InSpoken, Bound by Cabinet Solidarity

Or Out

And OutSpoken...

Whether 'tis Nobler...

To be, or not to be, that is the question:Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to sufferThe Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,And by opposing end them: to die, to sleepNo more; and by a sleep, to say we endThe Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocksThat Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummationDevoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause. There's the respectThat makes Calamity of so long life:For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,The Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely,The pangs of disprized Love, the Law’s delay,The insolence of Office, and the SpurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy takes,When he himself might his Quietus makeWith a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But that the dread of something after death,The undiscovered Country, from whose bournNo Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,And makes us rather bear those ills we have,Than fly to others that we know not of.Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,And thus the Native hue of ResolutionIs sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,And enterprises of great pith and moment,With this regard their Currents turn awry,And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy OrisonsBe all my sins remembered.

On Q & A a week ago, in a discussion about "sex work" and (the apparently now-contentious term) "prostitution", Germain Greer said :

GERMAINE GREER: Well, one of the major tenets of modern feminism is the protest against the commoditisation of people. Now, if you're selling sex services with a clearly understood bargain between two people which will be honoured by both sides and which both sides are fully cognisant of what's going on and you're not connected to organised crime or any of the other horrors that beset prostitution, I don't see that it's any different from having to smile for a living. You know, you can't be a waitress and be grumpy. Even though it's work that makes you incredibly grumpy, you've still got to smile and make people think that it's all up and it's all pippy-poo and it's all fun even when it's absolutely not fun at all. Most of us have to sell ourselves in some way or another. In some ways, just selling sex is to sell less of yourself than when you become a company person, when you become identified with your employer, when your employer dictates your very mental processes. We are all involved in selling things that shouldn't be sold at all. It's called capitalism. It's the system. And Eve was the first person to work in it.

A comparable other who made the artist-to-government move before Garrett is Glenda Jackson, actress turned British Labour Party parliamentarian.

Jackson first came to our attention

(and to that of Theatre of the Actors of Regard)

in Peter Brook's Marat/Sade : The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. (So impressed were we by the film of the play, we bought the book of the play by Peter Weiss.)

Glenda Jackson playedCharlotte Corday; a role that might be seen to presage her own commitment to the art of politics.

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known to history as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed under the guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible, through his role as a politician and journalist, for the more radical course the Revolution had taken.

Jean-Paul Marat was a member of the radical Jacobin faction which had a leading role during the Reign of Terror. As a journalist, he exerted power and influence through his newspaper, L'Ami du peuple ("The Friend of the People").

Corday's decision to kill Marat was stimulated not only by her revulsion at the September Massacres, for which she held Marat responsible, but for her fear of an all-out civil war. She believed that Marat was threatening the Republic, and that his death would end violence throughout the nation. She also believed that King Louis XVI should not have been executed.

Last week Margaret Thatcher died. The British Parliament called a special session for tributes to this former three-times elected Tory Prime Minister.

Should one not speak ill of the dead, as custom dictates?

What of hypocrisy? Here's an artist on such tributes by politicians for politicians :Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones;So let it be with Caesar. The noble BrutusHath told you Caesar was ambitious:If it were so, it was a grievous fault;And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest, —For Brutus is an honorable man;So are they all, all honorable men, —Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.He was my friend, faithful and just to me:But Brutus says he was ambitious;And Brutus is an honorable man.

Mark Antony,Scene 2 : Julius Ceasar by William Shakespeare

We think it worth reading into the Hansard (sic) ofbLOGOS/HA HA the speech that Glenda Jackson delivered to the hissing pit of Tory scorn.

[John Bercow, The Speaker]…Glenda Jackson

[Glenda Jackson]Thank you to the speaker. It is hardly a surprise that Baroness Thatcher was careless over soup being poured over Lord Howe, when she was apparently perfectly prepared to send him out to the wicket with a broken bat. Mr. Deputy — Mr. Speaker, when I made my maiden speech all in this Chamber, a little over two decades ago, Margaret Thatcher had been elevated to the other place. But Thatcherism was still reeking as it had reeked for the previous decade, the most heinous social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country, upon my constituency and my constituents.

Our local hospitals were running on empty. Patients were staying on trolleys in corridors. I tremble to think what the death rate for pensioners would have been this winter if that version of Thatcherism had been fully up and running this year.

[John Bercow]Hold on.

[Glenda Jackson]Our schools, parents, teachers, governors, even pupils, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising in order to be able to provide basic materials such as paper and pencils. The plaster on our classroom walls were kept in place by pupils’ art work and miles and miles of sellotape.

Our school libraries were dominated by empty shelves, very few books, and those books that were there again, were being held together by ubiquitous sellotape and off-cuts from teachers’ wallpaper used to bind those volumes so that they could at least hang together.

But by far, by far the most dramatic and heinous demonstration of Thatcherism was certainly not only in London, but across the whole country in metropolitan areas, where every single shop doorway, every single night, became the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom for the homeless.

They grew in their thousands. And many of those homeless people had been thrown out on to the streets from the long-term — the closure of the long-term mental hospitals. We were told it was going to be called — it was called — Care in the Community, what in effect it was, was NO CARE at all in the community.

I was interested to hear about Baroness Thatcher’s willingness to invite those who have nowhere to go for Christmas. It’s a pity she didn’t start building more and more social houses after she entered into the right to buy, so perhaps there would have been fewer homeless people than there were.

As a friend of mine said, during her era London became a city Hogarth would have recognized and indeed he would. But the basis to Thatcherism, and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as a desperate, desperately wrong track that the lead – that Thatcherism took this country into is that we were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice, and I still regard them as vices, under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees, they put the way forward. We heard much, and will continue to hear over the next week of the barriers that were broken down by Thatcherism, the establishment that was destroyed.

We can’t take it.

[Glenda Jackson]What we actually saw — the word that has been circling around with stars around it is that she created an aspirational society. It aspired for things. As indeed one of the former Prime Ministers, who himself have been elevated to the house of Lord, spoke about selling off the family silver, and people knowing under those years the price of everything and the value of nothing.

What concerns me is that I’m beginning to see possibly the re-emergence of that total traducing of what I regard as being the basis spiritual nature of this country, where we do care about society, where we do believe in communities, where we do not leave people to walk by on the other side. That isn’t happening now.

And if we go back to the heyday of that era, I think it will – we will see replicated yet again, the extraordinary human damage that we as a nation have suffered from, the talent that has been totally wasted because of the inability to genuinely see the individual value of every single human being.

My honorable friend my Hackney referred to the fact that although she had differed from with Lady Thatcher in her policies, she felt duty bound to come to pay tribute to the first woman Prime Minister this country had produced.

I am with generation who was raised by women. The men had all gone to war to defend our freedoms. They didn’t just run a Government, they run a country. And the women that I knew, who raised me and millions of people like me, who ran our factories and our businesses, put out the fires when the bombs dropped, they would not have recognized their definition of womanliness has been incorporated an iconic model of Margaret Thatcher to pay tribute to the first Prime Minister deputed by female gender, okay; but a woman? Not on my terms.

[John Bercow]Point of orders to Tony Baldry.

[Tony Baldry]Mr. Speaker, the conventions of the House in respect of those occasions, rare occasions on which the house chooses to make tributes to a person who has been deceased are well established.

This is not and has never been a general debate on the memory of the person who has been deceased, but an opportunity for tribute, not an opportunity for honorable members to denigrate the memory of the person who has been deceased.

[John Bercow]Resume his seat. I’m grateful to the honorable gentlemen for his, and I use the term advisably attempted point of order.

Let me be explicit for the benefit both of the honorable gentlemen and of the house. All honorable and right honorable members take responsibility for what they say in this place. The responsibility of that Chair is to ensure that nothing un-parliamentary occurs. Let me assure the honorable gentlemen for the avoidance of doubt.

Nothing un-parliamentary has occurred. We are debating a motion that says that this House has considered the matter of tributes to the Baroness Thatcher. That is what we are doing and nothing has got…

MINISTER GARRETT : Thanks Prime Minister, and there’s no question that education is the great enabler.

And today, what we’re saying is that the nation needs a plan to make sure that kids around the country get the support they need to do the best they can and of course correspondingly for both those children and their families, and the nation to benefit in the future.

A National Plan for School Improvement means that we’re putting education right at the front of our vision for Australia; an Australia that is well-trained, highly skilled and where kids in schools now get high-paying jobs in the future, not only here but of course in the increasingly important Asian region.

If I look at schools, in all of the schools that I visit, I know that we can provide targeted additional resources and investment that will make a big difference to the kids in those schools.

And if we look at an average figure of $4000 per student that is the kind of money which might help that kid read or write better...

detailA Person Looks At A Work Of Art/someone looks at something ...

LOGOS/HA HA

14 April 2013

"My name is Diana Smith and primarily I'm a performance artist working with a group called Brown Council. I'm also currently undertaking my Ph.D., which is looking at the History of Performance Art in Australia."

Artscape: Don't Try This At Home - Performance Art in AustraliaABC TV 9 April 2013

10 April 2013

bLOGOS/HA HA is always interested in|visible means of support and the musics thereof - the tensioning of machine-heads, the plucking of strings, the striking of hammers... Slave Musics

Here is the (repeatable) score to a ...

Prepared Hammers event #

LE PORTRAIT DE LA PRIMA DONNA

Place framed projection-space LE PORTRAIT DE LA PRIMA DONNA on floor and leaning against wall

Above that

- hold prepared nail to wall with one hand

- hold prepared hammer in other hand

- fix regard at point of hammerfall

Duration : preset period or as long as possible

Below is a lithographic record of this tableau vivant - LE PORTRAIT DE LA PRIMA DONNA - as performed for Theatre of the Actors of Regard by a member of the preCagean percussion collectivePrepared Hammers

Paul Gavarni (Sulpice-Guillaume Chevalier) 1858

detail A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/ someone looks at something ...